User downloading huge file size(3 gb) from toshiba site (Internet) and its takes around 4 - 14 hours to download the files. advised user to download that large file sizes after business hours to get more about this.

Can you please tell me :

1)where can I start troubleshoot.
2)what type of information I need to gather.
3)how can I get confirmed this problem related to switching and routing or Firewall issue.

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Hi - the issue could be with Toshiba's network connection. Some companies throttle their ftp sites so as to not to have this traffic adversely impact the rest of their traffic (e.g. e-mail, phone, inter-system data, etc, etc). Chris

What is your connection speed to the Internet? Just do a little math to see how long would it take with your connection (assuming there is unlimited speed everywhere else besides your connection to ISP).

For example, if you have a single T1, which is 1.5 MBit/s:

1.5 MBit/s ~= 1500 KBit/s ~= 150 KBytes/s (assuming overhead).

So, 3 GBytes file is 3,000,000 KBytes (I round up "kilo" to 1000 instead of 1024 for simplicity). Which means that in the ideal world, when there is no other traffic on your Internet connection, it will take 20,000 seconds (333 minutes, or about 6 hours). And this is, again, "the perfect world scenario", when we do not count additional IP and protocol overhead, we assume there is no one else doing anything on this Internet link, etc.

Another thing - you may have 100 MBit or even 1 GBit connection to your ISP, but your ISP may have slow or busy uplink to the Internet. Or some of his upstream providers may be a bottleneck. Not mentioning that Toshiba FTP server may have limitations on "per client bandwidth" for FTP sessions.

When you say user I assume you mean someone on your network. Do you see the same slowness when YOU try downloading that 3BG file? Have you tried downloading large files from other sites? You should be able to determine if there is a problem with your network or just this single user by doing non-technical tests like these. And you can assume your download speed is much less in reality than your ISP advertises. There's also sites like: http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ that can provide some idea of Internet connectivity speed.

If all checks out you might want to check the line quality. Line throughput is a combination of three factors.
-bandwidth
-latency
-packet loss

So a 10Mb line with 50 milliseconds of latency and .5% packet loss will only reach 3.3 Mbps per flow. Since most apps rarely transfer data in parallel, you can see why it might taking so long to download the file. I discuss these issues over on Network World, if it would help. You can read it here: http://bit.ly/JYjdYa

Check out if you have interruptions, that is, breaks of connectivity to the Net. They will slow you down terribly. The old client programs used to just forget about your transter and you had to start from the beginning. If you have a client that will continue the transfer, it will still need to log in again to the server - that takes time.
Hope this helps.
Kobra